‘If you have ever sat in a doctor’s waiting room, next to someone with a hacking cough and with only a pile of out-of-date Reader’s Digests for company, then you may have asked whether the system was fit for 21st Century living.

The NHS seems under increasing pressure, from GP surgeries to accident and emergency rooms. It feels as if the healthcare system is in desperate need of CPR – the question is will technology be the thing that brings it back to life?

Daniel Kraft is a trained doctor who heads up the medicine school at the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based organisation that runs graduate and business courses on how technology is going to disrupt the status quo in a variety of industries.

When I interview him he is carrying a device that looks suspiciously like a Tricorder, the scanners that were standard issue in Star Trek.

“This is a mock-up of a medical tricorder that can scan you and get information. I can hold it to my forehead and it will pick up my heart rate, my oxygen saturation, my temperature, my blood pressure and communicate it to my smartphone,” he explains.

In future, Dr Kraft predicts, such devices will be linked to artificial intelligence agents on smartphones, which in turn will be connected to super-computers such as IBM’s Watson, to give people instant and accurate diagnoses.

“It may say, ‘Daniel, this is looking bad – you need to go to the emergency room’, or it might say this is probably just the flu because there is a lot in the neighbourhood and your symptoms are consistent with that.”

No such device is yet on the market but in the US there is currently a $10m (£6m) prize on offer to design one that is suitable for use in the home; 300 teams are competing.

Wearable devices such as Nike’s FuelBand or Jawbone’s Up are making people ever more aware of their health.

The premise of the recent Ovum Future of Work Summit, sponsored by Computacenter and Microsoft, was that the ways in which businesses work today is being fundamentally changed by mobile and social technology.

Over the course of the day presenters from a variety of organisations discussed how technology is redefining roles in organisations and enterprise social networks. If adopted effectively it can enable organisations to be agile, outcome-focused and more efficient, while at the same time increasing employee satisfaction, backed by new opportunities for performance analytics

There were 3 key themes that ran through the discussion topics

The Multi-Screen Workplace

Mobility

Social Enterprise

The Multi-Screen Workplace

Users are no longer using a single (fixed) device on which they conduct their work, and, in common with a range of other research in the area, people are increasingly time/work-slicing across a range of different device…

Enterprise mobility will continue to be one of the hottest topics in IT, and high on the list of priorities for all CIOs, according to Ovum’s Enterprise Mobility 2014 Trends-to-Watch report*. Consumerization (i.e. the impact of technology designed first and foremost for consumers) has driven the enterprise mobility market over the last few years, and Ovum has identified the three major trends in mobile consumerization that will have the biggest impact on businesses in 2014. Mobile First (formerly BYOX World Forum), the 5th Annual edition of Ovum’s flagship enterprise mobility event, returns to London on 4-5 June 2014. Download the 2013 post-show report here.

Enterprise Mobility 2014 Trends-to-Watch:

Businesses will need to provide a strong multi-screen, multi-channel experience for customers and employees, as mobile devices increasingly become the first point of contact between a business and its customers (B2C), suppliers (B2B), and employees. Organisations will need to provide a slick user experience (UX) for every aspect of the business, from marketing, advertising, promotion, and sales through to internal processes, and whether the stakeholder is using a smartphone, tablet, or PC. Getting this right can be a complicated task and will require a strong focus on UX, both during the app development process and in terms of providing a corporate network with the capacity to deal with all the mobile devices demanding access to it.

Businesses will address the drivers of BYOD with their new comprehensive corporate mobility policies. Businesses are already responding to BYOD with CYOD (choose your own device) or COPE (corporate-owned, personally enabled) strategies – in which employees are given a choice of devices to use by their employer and may also be permitted to use them personal purposes – and we expect to see more of this in 2014. We also expect to see an increasing number of vertical or role-based mobility programs with strict corporate policies that specify mobile devices and applications (e.g. tablets provided to airline pilots).

Apps will drive the next phase in the evolution of enterprise mobility, creating new ways of working, and transforming existing business processes. In 2014, enterprise mobile apps will become a core part of the enterprise IT application stack. This will create challenges for the enterprise such as getting the UX right and enabling tight integration with internal systems. It also provides a big opportunity for app developers, systems integrators, and mobility management vendors. Enterprise mobility is moving away from a pure mobility or device problem to an IT corporate management problem, with secure access, content, application, and BI implications.

Enterprise mobility programs will extend beyond being pure connectivity and device issues for IT and business decision-makers. For organizations that already have a mobility strategy in place, the next phase will be to start mobilizing as many internal processes as possible to allow workers to perform their core tasks (beyond email) from whichever device they have to hand, from wherever they are.

Richard Absalom, senior analyst of Enterprise Mobility, at Ovum, says: “As businesses adapt to increasing consumerization and extend the range of tools and applications available to employees on all devices, enterprises and supply-side vendors alike need to be prepared for these developing trends: businesses in order to realize the full business benefits of mobile working, and vendors in order to address enterprise demand and remain relevant in a crowded, highly competitive market.”